FTL Drive – Second Thoughts

In a previous post I stated Faster Than Light (FTL) Drives are impossible considering the energy that it would take to warp space. I now have second thoughts If a time machine can be constructed. Professor Ronald Mallett in 1999 showed that using Einstein’s general Theory of Relativity it’s possible by creating closed timelike curves. Stephen Hawking. however, proved this impossible without exotic matter with negative energy. Olum and Everett argued that with current laser technology the laser ring would be the size of the known Universe. Even with these detractors I’m not ruling this out in the far future.

Now, given a time machine, how do you achieve FTL? My first approximation is to have a time machine at the destination and the passengers go into stasis for the journey and upon arrival go into the time machine and come out when they left. Due to stasis and time dilation (traveling close to the speed of light) they have aged very little. They have already beat the clock but now comes the tricky part.

They decide on a return trip to Earth so they get into the time machine again and go back in time to when the machine was still on Earth. They pop out and are back on Earth way before they left. Very weird, but the time machine has become an FTL drive on the way back without going anywhere. Note that it is also a teleportation machine. The odd part of this is it has to work if time machines are to work at all since the reference frame of the time machine shouldn’t make any difference. If it did, the Earth rotation and its orbiting the Sun would cause the time machine to malfunction. There is no such thing as an absolute coordinate in space. I guess I will have to allow FTL drives and teleportation if I allow time machines in distant future fiction.